How to make puff pastry dough (the easy way)

I love puff pastry, and it makes a lot of baking projects more delicious and glorious. But most people view it either as something to be purchased from an expensive store, or something that takes monumental effort and talent. This recipe, adapted from River Cottage Every Day, proves that to be wrong! This takes about 15 minutes to prepare, and then rests for (at least) 30 minutes, giving you easy puff pastry dough in well under an hour. Pretty awesome. Use this dough for french fruit tarts (entry forthcoming), pasties (where this recipe first appeared on this blog), as a pot pie topper, or any of a thousand other excellent ideas. 

Puff pastry 
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon  salt
2/3 cup butter, chilled and chopped into small cubes
ice water

Procedure
Sift the flour and salt together in a large bowl. Throw in the cold chopped up butter and toss until all the butter chunks are covered with flour. You can use a pastry cutter if you want, but if you do, make sure you don't over-chop the butter. This is important if you want that delicious flakiness in the pastry! The butter cubes shouldn't be smaller than 1 cubic cm (not that I measured). Definitely don't use a food processor---I've made that mistake.

Add the water a couple of tablespoons at a time, mixing it in with a wooden spoon, until you have just enough liquid to make a firm dough. The butter is still in chunks at this point.

Shape the dough roughly into a rectangular prism with your hands and put it on a well-floured surface. Flour a rolling pin and roll the dough out in just one direction (away from you is easiest) until it makes a long, flat rectangle -- about 1/4" thick. Fold the top third down and the bottom third up over that (like a letter) so that you have a rectangle that's three layers thick. Rotate 90 degrees and repeat the process. Roll out, fold, and rotate a total of six times. Then cover the dough with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to rest for at least 30 minutes. You can also freeze it, and it should keep for a good long while.

Cheesy buttermilk biscuits

I love biscuits. I mean, to an unhealthy degree. Someone mentioned the word "biscuits" 3 days ago, and this ravenous part of my brain turned on and wouldn't shut up about how badly I need to bake and eat some biscuits right this second. And it wasn't even the relevant context: they were asking if they could give my dogs biscuits.  

I don't know how I waited 3 days before making them, but it happened, and it made the biscuits that much more delicious. No wait. It didn't. Because biscuits are the maximum amount of delicious already. 

Now that we're clear, here's a biscuit recipe. It is mostly adapted from the classic Joy of Cooking, with the addition of some cheese.

Ingredients
1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
5 Tablespoons butter
3/4 cup buttermilk (or just put about a tablespoon of lemon juice into 3/4 cup milk)
1/4 cup grated parmesan
1/4 cup grated cheddar

Procedure
Preheat oven to 450F. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, sugar, and baking soda in a large bowl. Cut in the butter (either with a pastry cutter or just with a knife). Keep chopping the butter up until it's as small as you're willing to get it. Pour in the buttermilk and the parmesan and mix lightly, just until you more or less have something you can call dough.

Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface. Knead gently for 20-30 seconds. Using your knuckles, pat the dough down to about 1/4 - 1/2 inch thickness. (Obviously the thicker the dough, the thicker the biscuit. I like mine pretty thick, but you may not. Play around with it if you're not sure.) Cut circles into the dough (I used the small end of a plastic funnel for canning; I've also used the rims from Ball jar lids). Place onto a foil-lined baking sheet. If you want a little cheesy crust on top, sprinkle the cheddar on top. Bake for 8-12 minutes, or until the biscuits are just starting to get golden on top.

Cut them in half, lengthwise, and add a thin pat of butter in the middle. Enjoy with some pork chops, tea and jam, or literally every other thing.

Challah back!

Holla! I finally made some challah! Is that joke super old? A-yup. I'll stop.

Active prep time: 20-30 minutes
Passive (waiting) prep time: 2.5 hours
Bake time: 30-40 minutes

Ingredients [Makes 2 braided loaves]
2.5 cups warm water (110 F)
2 tsp instant yeast (or 1 Tbsp active dry)
0.75 cups honey
4 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 egg, 3 egg yolks, and 1 more whole egg for brushing on at the end
1.5 Tbsp salt
8 cups flour

Procedure

Put the water into a large bowl (or a KitchenAid stand mixer if you have one). Sprinkle the yeast into the water (you can technically skip this proofing part if you're using instant yeast, but I don't think it makes a difference so I'll include it here in case you're using active dry yeast instead). Beat in honey, oil, 1 egg, the egg yolks, and the salt until thoroughly mixed. You might have kind of a frothy mixture at this point but that's OK.

Beat in one cup of flour at a time (waiting for it to mix in thoroughly before continuing). If you're using an electric hand mixer (or a whisk---jeez, I don't envy you if you're doing this without the aid of kitchen power tools), you'll want to switch to kneading when you've added enough flour that you have a thick dough. If you're using a stand mixer, just beat it with the dough hook to begin with and you don't really have to worry about it.

Knead the dough for a couple of minutes, until you have a soft, thick dough that is no more than a tiny bit sticky. Cover with a damp cloth and let it rest until the dough about doubles in size (about 1.5-2 hours in my experience, but this will depend on the temperature in the room and the activeness of the yeast, so just start checking the dough every half hour after the first hour has gone by; if you're too busy to be that attentive, you'll probably be fine even if it over-proofs slightly). 

NB: You may want to grease or flour up a bowl and let the dough rest in there, as I found that putting it in a bowl without those precautions resulted in some extra work in scraping sticky dough off a bowl.

...

OK, now that the dough has doubled, punch it down in the bowl, and turn it over onto a pretty floury surface. Split it into two halves (one for each loaf) and knead each one for a few minutes. Add flour as necessary to keep it from sticking to your hands, but don't go overboard. 

Now the most fun part! If you want to do the traditional braided type loaf, start by splitting each half into thirds (more or less), and making each piece into a long snake about 2 inches in diameter. 

Squish the (let's say right) ends of the three snakes together firmly, and braid them. Squish the open ends (left, in this case) together when you're done.

NB: Some people like the circular style loaf. You can achieve that by braiding the strands together and then squishing the ends of your loaf together into a sort of braided bagel shape.

Place the loaves on a well-greased baking sheet. Once again, cover with a damp towel and allow it to rest for an hour.

 

NB: Unless you don't mind your loaves sort of melding into one, be sure to give them a good amount of space when you let them rise! Oops. 

...

So, now you have fat, squishy braids ready to be baked! Preheat the oven to 375F. Beat an egg and brush generously onto the loaves, coating every surface as best you can. This will give the bread that nice glazed, shiny, and browned surface that you probably associate with challah.

Bake at 375F for about 40 minutes, until the bread is browned and you can flip it over and thump the bottom and hear a nice hollow thud. Personally, I like challah much less if it's kind of overbaked and dense, so if this is important to you, I'd start checking every 5 minutes after it's been in the oven for 30 minutes, because it would be a shame to waste such a potentially delicious bread by making it gross.

When it's done, let it cool on a wire rack for at least an hour before cutting into it (to avoid crumbliness or squashed bread, etc.). Voila!

Some more notes

• If you object to slightly stale challah, and you aren't having lots of company, I recommend halving the recipe and just making a single loaf. I'm not totally sure why I made two---probably because the recipe I adapted this from called for two and I wasn't in the mood to do simple division. Also, you may want to freeze it after the first day or two of sitting out and just make toast with it. I noticed it tasted a little more stale already on the second day.
• Speaking of toast and too much challah... you can also make challah french toast. But that's a recipe for another time, so you'll have to look that up on your own.
• I noticed it wasn't as flaky on the inside as challah usually is. Check back for a follow-up challah experiment to see if I figure out why.
• Source: adapted from this recipe.

Mini Meat Pies

Following our Game of Thrones themed birthday party, we had an insane amount of leftovers. The small amount of lamb still leftover two weeks later was easily dispatched by our dogs (they liked it almost as much as when they got to devour blue cheese filet mignon last week -- yeah, these dogs are ridiculously spoiled). The only thing left was a bit of rabbit stew. Super delicious and made by my mom -- who will perhaps post a recipe here one day?!

So today I finally got off my butt and decided to use our leftovers for good! And hence rabbit muffins. Or... Stew scone? Bunny bread? Carcass cupcake? Yeesh, okay, I'll stick with mini meat pies.


Ingredients
Leftovers
Pie crust

Pie Crust
[For 12 mini pies.]
2 cups flour
2/3 cup shortening
1 tsp salt
~1/2 cup cold water

Procedure

Mix flour, salt, and shortening together using a pastry blender until you have a fairly homogenous crumbly mixture. Add in water, a little bit at a time, and stir with a wooden spoon until the dough forms a ball. Roll it out (depending on your work surface, you may want to roll out half of it at a time) pretty thin line the bottoms of a greased muffin tin. Spoon in your leftover filling (any thick stew would work, as would anything that's not too runny).

 Cover the filling with another layer of dough, crimp the edges with a fork, and glaze with a bit of egg wash. Bake at 425F for about 15-20 minutes, or until the pie is slightly golden on top.

When you're splitting up the dough into the muffin cups, neatness is not very important. Just rip out a portion roughly large enough to go into the cup and stick out a over the sides. Same for the top. All that matters is you can crimp the edges to seal in the meaty goodness.

* Dog approved!

(Taken with a pie held over the camera. Don't feel bad, he got to eat it after.)

Storage/Leftovers
These will not be great re-heated, so only make the amount you plan to eat. Remaining uncooked dough can be frozen.

Honeyed Chicken with Chickpea Salad (for Game of Thrones feast)

Before we even get to the recipe, I just want to explain how happy I am right now. And to do that, I think you need to understand something about me. Here it is. I love chicken. No, seriously, I love chicken. I love the golden, crispy, salty skin and the tender, juicy meat. I love how chicken can go with almost any meal. But mostly it's that golden, crispy, salty skin. The only downside to chicken, until last night, was that while I've enjoyed many a delicious rotisserie in my day, I've never been able to produce a whole chicken that wasn't either: 

• partially undercooked, 
• partially overcooked, 
• encrusted in an oily, undelicious mush more resembling a burnt latex glove coated in grease than the skin described earlier, or
• simply tasteless.

That has finally changed! And this in a poorly designed electric oven! So here it is, the maybe not-so-secret secret to delicious baked chicken:

STONES

That's it. Just take some tiles/stones/whatever (make sure they won't explode in the oven -- you can shell out some dough -- har har -- for a legit pizza stone, or get some household tiles from Home Depot; we used some leftover tiles from our hearth). Put them on the very top rack, and place the chicken on the rack below. About an hour later -- voila, feast.

We made this as a practice run for a Game of Thrones-themed feast we will be hosting in a couple of weeks. This one is definitely a go! OK, now I'm done with the fanfare. Here's the recipe, loosely adjusted from A Feast of Ice and Fire.

Ingredients

1 whole chicken (innards removed)

2 Tbsp butter, melted

1 tsp kosher salt

1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp butter
1-2 Tbsp honey
1-2 tsp basil
1/3 cup currants (raisins are an okay substitute if you don't have currants, but are sweeter, so adjust honey accordingly)

Procedure
Place tiles/stones on top rack of oven (so that they're generally covering the whole top rack), placing the top rack as high up as it will go. Preheat oven to 450F. Pat the chicken dry and place it in a glass baking dish. Rub all of the skin with the butter and then sprinkle salt evenly, rubbing it in with your fingers as well. Place on the rack below the tiles and bake for approximately an hour, or until the meat in the breast is cooked to at least 165 degrees. I think this took me about 70 minutes in all.

Meanwhile! Combine the other ingredients in a small pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for about 20-30 minutes, or until the mixture reduces to about half its original volume. When the chicken is done, add the pan drippings to the pot and simmer for another 5-10 minutes. Pour the resulting gravy over the chicken. Eat with your hands and say dumb medieval-sounding stuff for the rest of the night!

Serving suggestion
Serve with a chickpea salad (adapted from the same book): roasted chickpeas and currants/raisins on a bed of arugula, drizzled with and oil & vinegar dressing.

Reuse & Recycle!
Roasted chicken: the gift that keeps on giving. When you're done feasting, slice off any remaining meat from the carcass. This will be delicious in a sandwich or salad over the next few days. (Pictured: grilled sandwich with chicken breast, roasted chickpeas, muenster cheese, tomato, arugula, and spicy brown mustard.)

Save the carcass for making stock. You can dump the entire carcass into a big stockpot along with an onion or two and a few carrots, cover with water, and simmer, covered, on low heat for a good long while.

Pasties (also: an easy puff pastry recipe)

Another experiment brought about because of River Cottage Every Day, even though all we used of that book here was the recipe for cheaty puff pastry. Cheaty because it isn't as complicated as "real" puff pastry, but I couldn't tell the difference between this and any other puff pastry I've tried, especially on those pasties in which the dough wasn't rolled out too thinly.

Puff pastry 
[Makes 6-7 pasties]
2 cups flour
pinch salt
2/3 cup butter, chilled and chopped into small cubes
ice water

[I would recommend adding more salt!]

Procedure
Sift the flour and salt together in a large bowl. Throw in the cold chopped up butter and toss until all the butter chunks are covered with flour. I found it easiest to do this with my hands. Add the water a couple of tablespoons at a time, mixing it in with a wooden spoon, until you have just enough liquid to make a firm dough. The butter is still in chunks at this point.

Shape the dough roughly into a rectangular prism with your hands and put it on a well-floured surface. Flour a rolling pin and roll the dough out in just one direction (away from you is easiest) until it makes a long, flat rectangle -- about 3/8" thick. Fold the top third down and the bottom third up over that (like a letter) so that you have a rectangle that's three layers thick. Rotate 90 degrees and repeat the process. Roll out, fold, and rotate a total of six times. Then cover the dough with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to rest for at least 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, prep the fillings (see below for some examples). When ready, preheat the oven to 375F and pull out the chilled dough and roll it out so that it's about 1/8" thick. Use a plate or pot lid to cut out circles (I used a smaller pot lid, which gave me 6-7 pasties from each rectangle of dough). Spoon the dough just off center, and fold the dough circle in half. Brush the edges of the pastry just a little bit with water and crimp them tightly, making sure the filling is sealed in. I think the more you can fit inside, the better it'll taste, but that's up to you. Brush the tops with an egg wash (use 1 egg beaten together with 1 tablespoon of milk), lay on a greased, foil-lined baking sheet, and bake for about 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Fillings 

In this first and unreasonably ambitious experiment, we made four savory and one sweet type of pastie. This is a great medium for shoving it full of whatever leftovers or random ideas you have, so the following filling descriptions are pretty vague -- no exact amounts or instructions. You can figure them out yourself. :) 

1. Mushroom & Barley
   barley
   chopped mushrooms
   cooked spinach
   onions
   salt
   black pepper
2. Chickpeas & Curry
   chickpeas
   boiled chicken
   red pepper
   green beans
   potatoes
   curry
3. Butternut Squash & Chicken
   boiled chicken
   boiled butternut squash, pureed
   potatoes
   raisins (optional)
   onions
4. Keema Matar
   
   I made keema last night with this recipe and used the leftovers for this pasty. :)
5. Butternut Squash, Ricotta, & Raisins
   
   boiled butternut squash, pureed
   ricotta
   brown sugar
   raisins

More fall stuff: Pumpkin Bread

Continuing on about fall... we got a couple of pie pumpkins at this weekend's farmers market. Using insights from perfecting the banana bread recipe for the last few years, we decided to make pumpkin bread.

Warning you right now though. It's ridiculously hard to stop eating this stuff. I was feeling pretty awesome about myself until three of us sat down and polished off almost an entire loaf in a single sitting. It was delicious but even beyond that, there's just something pretty much addictive about it that makes you shovel it into your mouth.

Whatever, I warned you. But if you want pumpkin bread, which you should, then read on!

Ingredients
(makes 1 loaf)

• 1 medium pie pumpkin
• 1 and 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour (regular flour is fine too)
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup butter, melted
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
• 1/4 tsp allspice (optional)
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon (optional)

Procedure
Preheat oven to 385F. Cut pumpkin in half and scoop out the seeds  and save them for roasting -- roasted pumpkin seeds make a tasty snack. (Note: If you're only making a single loaf, you only need one of the halves. I'm not sure how well a cut pumpkin will last, but it'll probably be fine in the fridge with some plastic wrap on it. We just doubled the recipe to accommodate all the pumpkin puree we ended up with.)

Rub the cut sides with butter and sprinkle on a bit of salt. Place pumpkin halves cut side up onto a baking sheet and bake for 45-60 minutes, or until the flesh is pretty mushy.

When the pumpkin is done, scoop out the flesh and put it in a mixing bowl (alternatively, just peel off the... peel; this should be really easy by now). If it's mushy enough, just mush it with a fork. If not, use an immersion blender (we baked our pumpkin for about 50 minutes and it wasn't quite fork-ready, but an immersion blender worked great; we left it a bit chunky but you can make it as creamy as you like). Set aside.

In another bowl, combine the sugar, eggs, butter, and vanilla (and allspice and cinnamon if using) and whisk together thoroughly. Add in dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder) and mix together slightly -- just enough to get it mixed together. Don't over-mix, or you'll have a kind of dense/tough bread with big air holes in it. Add in the pureed pumpkin. You don't want the batter to get too wet or else it'll taste kind of under-cooked (but if you're okay with that taste, it's not hurting anyone!), so add in a bit at a time until it reaches a nice consistency. It shouldn't be somewhat viscous if you try to pour it.

Grease a loaf pan, and pour the batter in until it's about 3/4 full. Bake for about 45 minutes or until the top is golden brown. Do the toothpick test (or fork test if you're too lazy to find a toothpick), but keep in mind that if you put in a ton of pumpkin, the toothpick may not come out totally clean even though the bread is cooked through.

Enjoy with tea! Keeps for a few days covered in foil and kept out of dogs' reach. 

Personal Peach Cobbler (and other fall stuff)

It's definitely fall. Where in central Vermont that once meant amazing foliage and crunchy fallen leaves to step on, it's now more about cloudy and rainy days with cold nights that justify the five days we spent hauling and stacking our three cords of firewood. (Whatever. I'll take it!) It also means pretty fall veggies, fruits, and... whatever this thing is.

(It's actually cauliflower. It's quite a hit with some stoners I know, though I haven't yet tasted it or heard any reviews from someone who has. It does have some cool mathematical properties, but I'm not sure how that impacts its taste.)

It's been a pretty good season of getting stuff from our CSA and picking our own whatever. A side note on that, by the way. We had "pick your own pumpkins" on the last day of our summer CSA. I was pretty excited about picking a nice fat pumpkin and hacking its stem off with a machete. So I was kind of confused when they didn't give us a machete when they pointed out the pumpkin patch. We went out there and all the pumpkins were already cut and just laying around on the ground.

Isn't that "pick-your-own" in the same sense that any produce aisle at a grocery store is pick-your-own? 

In any case, the point is that we have a bunch of pretty stuff that's all local and organic. (Except that melon with the sticker on it. That's from New Jersey.)

What I'm really trying to say is it's time to bake a bunch of fall stuff. Let's get this ADD party under control and get a recipe out there. There are really two: peach cobbler and pumpkin bread. To make it easier to find navigate later, I'll post pumpkin bread in a separate entry, though.

Ingredients 
(enough topping for about 3-4 one-person ramekins)

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted
• pinch baking soda
• pinch baking powder
• peaches, sliced

Procedure

Preheat oven to 350F. Fill little baking cups/ramekins almost to the top with sliced peaches. Add a tablespoon of water into each ramekin. [Note: I use peaches that I froze, so there is probably marginally more water content there than if you're using fresh ones, especially if the fresh ones you're using aren't that ripe. So you may want to edit that amount accordingly.] If you really have a sweet tooth, you can add a tablespoon or less for brown sugar here, but I just like the filling to be as is. 

Mix all the other ingredients in a bowl. It's easiest to just mush it up with your hands. There shouldn't be any really dry parts when you're done.

Crumble over the top of each ramekin. To get the peaches really bubbling, try to create a seal over the top of the fruit.  Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes. The topping should be a nice golden brown by then.

Wait a few minutes for it to cool slightly (and so you don't look like a total glutton because you grab food out of the oven and shove it down your throat -- again, maybe that's just me), and then EAT, man. With a cup of black tea. It'll survive waiting overnight and being reheated, but you're not doing anyone any favors by waiting more than a few minutes.

Variations

• You can use a glass baking dish if you want to just make one normal-sized cobbler; bake for about 45-60 minutes in that case, and add a few tablespoons of water. 

• Most other fruits are bound to work well -- combinations of them, too. I've successfully used apples, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. 
• If you're using apples, increase the amount of water to about 1/4 cup if filling an 8x8 baking dish, and probably add some sugar -- I put in 1/3 cup for a full 8x8 dish. For the berries, no extra sugar is necessary in the filling, and very little water, if any.
• If using strawberries, 3 teaspoons of brown sugar and 2 teaspoons of flour is all you need to add to the filling. No water.
• If using blueberries, definitely don't add water. About 3 teaspoons each of white sugar and flour works pretty well.

Baked Apples

We went to Moore's Orchard in Pomfret, VT for their last day of apple-picking. The lady there told me that they're closing their orchards to the public even though there are plenty of apples left on the trees for two primary reasons: (1) they'll use the rest of the apples for cider, and (2) the bears can't find wild apples this year and they want to leave enough for them; she said, "they've been hanging out in the orchards every night this season and throwing parties." Living in VT is awesome.

This recipe is really simple. It's roughly what my dad used to make for us when I was a kid as an after-dinner treat. Not gonna lie, though. Today I ate it for breakfast.

Ingredients
(makes 4 baked apples)
4 apples
3-4 Tbsp raisins
2-3 tsp honey
4 tsp scotch/brandy/whiskey/cognac

Procedure
Preheat the oven to 350F. Core the apples, but don't poke through all the way to the bottom, so that you're left with a kind of cup.

Save the tops that you cut off, too, because you're going to put them back on when you bake the apples. Place the apples in a baking dish (a lot of juice might come out, especially if you've accidentally poked a hole in the bottom, so you definitely don't want to do this without one).

Fill apples with whatever sounds good! I love the taste of raisins stewed in apple juice so I put in about a tablespoon of raisins into each apple (maybe less depending on the size of the apple and how large of a hole you cut), and then poured on another 1/2 teaspoon of honey and a bit more than a tablespoon of scotch. Replace the tops and put it on the top rack for about 30 minutes (more if you want them really mushy and falling apart -- after 30 minutes they're well-baked but still maintain some firmness).

They'll come out [not pictured] looking a bit like an old lady who's been in a tub too long [also not pictured], but far more appetizing. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream or just on its own. Probably best when still hot, but I still love it even when it's gotten pretty cool.

Variants
Make it more autumny/wintry by adding spices: heat some cinnamon sticks and cloves (rolled into a cheesecloth or in a spice bag or something so you don't have bits in your teeth later) in a bit of cider. Add honey/liquor/raisins/etc as before, and pour it all in.

Moist Banana (or pumpkin!) Bread

I have been meaning to post this recipe for a long time. It has never served me wrong! One day maybe I will remember to take a picture before eating the banana bread, but it's unlikely. :) Though now (October 2014) I've actually managed to take a photo of the pumpkin variation before eating it, so here it is:

As a warning, start checking the bread after 45 minutes. Sometimes I need a full hour, but usually it's more like 50 minutes. On the other hand, be careful not to lose too much heat from the oven by checking too often, or it'll be dry by the time it's finally baked through. Once you've gotten to know your oven, just use your judgement!

Ingredients

3/4 to 1 cup brown sugar 

1/2 cup butter, melted

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 - 1.5 cups flour (depending on your preference)

3-4 very ripe bananas, mashed - if using frozen, defrost fully beforehand 

Preheat oven to 375F and grease a loaf pan. Blend together first four ingredients (mixing vigorously with a fork is fine). In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ones and mix lightly (do not overmix). Fold in the bananas. Pour mixture into loaf pan and bake for 45-60 minutes.

Variations

1. Try adding 1/2 cup of chopped nuts and/or dried fruits.
2. Make it gluten free: replace the 1.5 cups of flour with 1.5 cups of gluten free flour (as always, I recommend Gluten Free Mama's Almond Blend) and add about 1/2 teaspoon of xanthan gum. If you don't have xanthan gum, that's fine -- the bread will come out a little flatter and more dense, but no less delicious.
3. Pumpkin bread! Replace the bananas with a can of (unsweetened, unflavored) pureed pumpkin.

Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

This recipe is adapted to gluten free from this one. Which means I didn't do anything very inventive besides lower the amount sweet stuff and put in the right amount of xanthan gum.

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups your favorite gluten free flour
• 7/8 tsp. xanthan gum
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
  
  
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt --> important for acidity (some people report good results when using milk, but I still think yogurt is important in this recipe)
• 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1+ cup mashed ripe bananas
• 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F. Combine first six ingredients in a bowl. In a separate large bowl, combine the egg, oil, yogurt, and vanilla. Pour dry ingredients into wet ingredients and fold over until just combined -- there can still be dry bits of flour in it, and that's fine.

Anyway, fold in the mashed bananas and chocolate chips. Grease muffin tins and fill each cup no more than 3/4 full (depending on how much of a muffin top you want to see in the finished product). Bake for 20-25 minutes. Cool for a little bit before removing from tins, and then transfer to a cooling rack.

Fun fact: In general, you don't want to overmix muffins or you'll have a tunneling problem: dense muffins with a bunch of holes in them from the air bubbles. (i.e. Use the muffin method, and Alton Brown fans, you know what that means.) But tunneling is created by gluten, a protein composite you don't want to over-excite if you don't want your muffins tasting like bubble gum. Our flour had no gluten to begin with, though, so maybe the muffin method is not as important in gluten-free baking. Does anyone actually know if this is true?

Nutty Energy Bars

This recipe came from River Cottage Every Day, unsurprisingly. I made a few adjustments on the basis of lacking ingredients or not liking certain things (e.g. using almond butter instead of peanut butter). In the end, I thought it was a little too sweet, so next time I would use maybe 1/3 cup of brown sugar and 2-3 tablespoons of honey. A suggested variation in the book is to use a mashed ripe banana in place of the nut butter, but I haven't tried that yet.

As you can see, my attempt at these bars gave me an odd pattern -- I tossed the seeds over the top and the mixture started bubbling when it came to a boil in the oven, and evidently it came up over the sides. I think it's pretty neat -- plus the edge pieces have no seeds, for added variety. :)

Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup raw, unsalted, unsweetened nut butter (I used almond butter)
1/4 cup honey
2/3 cup (packed) brown sugar
little bit of lemon zest (grated)

1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1 cup mixed seeds
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup (or less) chocolate chips

Directions
Preheat oven to 325F. Melt first five ingredients in a saucepan over very low heat, stirring occasionally. Add in the oats, raisins, and about 3/4 of the seeds. Mix together.

Grease an 8" baking dish and line with parchment paper (so that it's easy to remove the concoction after baking). Pour in "batter," smoothing it out on top. Scatter chocolate chips and remaining seeds on top.

Variation: I added half of the chocolate chips directly into the saucepan to have a more chocolatey base.

Bake for about 30 minutes. For me, the stuff came out pretty much liquid, which figures as there aren't a lot of solid (when heated) ingredients. Put it in the fridge until it cools completely -- it'll be pretty much rock hard by then. :) Store in the fridge, and eat at a little lower than room temperature so everything doesn't goo up in your hands.

Stuffed Tomatoes

I was looking through a cookbook on Middle Eastern food for inspiration when I came across a recipe for Tunisian stuffed tomatoes. Those call for olives and capers, which I really dislike, as well as preserved lemons, which I don't have. So this is a departure from the Tunisian traditional, but we loved it. Try it with lemony potatoes for a light dinner. Or just make the stuffing part as a quick spiced-up version of a tuna salad for lunch/snack.

Ingredients
2-4 medium tomatoes, firm but ripe
2 red peppers
1 can tuna (chunk light -- not albacore!), drained
1/4 cup parsley, chopped up, stems removed
1-2 tsp. lemon zest, grated

Directions
Roast the peppers. This is the most fun part. If you have a preferred method for pepper-roasting, do that and skip to the next paragraph. I like to do it the Alton Brown way -- directly over a gas burner. Put the peppers (one per burner, if you're doing more than one at a time) directly on the metal grate above the burner and turn with tongs every couple of minutes until you get an even char on the skin. (You'll remove that part, so don't worry.) Then put the hot, charred pepper into a bowl and cover with a plate. Let it sit until it cools, about 15 or so minutes. This will steam the pepper inside its skin.

Preheat the oven to about 350F. Combine all the other ingredients in a separate bowl. When the peppers are cooked through and cool enough to handle, peel off the skin. You should be able to do this easily with your fingers -- it'll come right off. Get all the charred bits off the pepper, and pull the pepper apart to reveal the seeds inside. Depending on how cooked through your peppers are, this may be messy. Get all of the seeds out, and then cut the peppers into thin strips (whatever size you want to eat inside the tomato).

Now take your tomatoes and cut a small hole into the tops -- reserve the caps. Scoop out all the juice and seeds with a spoon. Now shove your tuna/pepper mix into the tomatoes, replace the caps, place them on a baking dish, and roast for about 20-30 minutes. The tomato should be soft but should still retain its form.

Serve as a side dish or as a main course. Goes well with lemony roasted potatoes. If you have filling remaining, refrigerate and use for the next day's lunch box -- works well as a fresh tuna salad over a bed of baby spinach.

Roasted Lemony Potatoes

The idea for adding lemon slices to a baked dish came, unsurprisingly, from River Cottage Every Day. Turns out roasted lemons are delicious!

The amounts in this recipe, as in most others suggested on this blog, are very approximate. It's all just about how much of a meal you want to have, whether you want leftovers, how lemony you want your potatoes to taste, etc. It's also approximate because I don't weigh or measure things when I toss them together, so this is just a guess. The good news is that it makes no difference whatsoever.

[Serves 4-5 as a side dish.]
Ingredients
2-3 pounds potatoes
1 lemon
2-3 garlic cloves
olive oil (not extra virgin)
salt, pepper, herbs for seasoning
fresh parsley

Directions
Preheat oven to 400F. Soak and wash potatoes, scrubbing off any ground-in dirt, but leaving skin in tact. Depending on the size of the potatoes you can leave them whole or halve/quarter them. I used golden potatoes and quartered them. Boil them for about 5 minutes, until they're still pretty firm but can be pierced with a fork. Pour into a colander of some sort and drain. Slice the lemon thickly, and maybe cut the slices in half if you like. Crush the garlic cloves but leave the skin in tact so as not to over-roast the garlic. Place the potatoes, lemon slices, and garlic in an ungreased baking dish. Season as you see fit (I used some garlicky salt and random herbs & spices -- some oregano, maybe thyme, and other stuff). Pour olive oil generously over the mixture and toss it around with your hands until everything's pretty mixed around.
Bake until a golden brown crust starts to appear on the potatoes. At about 30 minutes I got too hungry to wait for the browning and I put the potatoes in the broiler for about 2-3 minutes, which did the trick. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with parsley and/or whatever other fresh herbs you like most.

Biscotti

This biscotti is relatively soft, compared to the more traditional rock-hard biscotti. The recipe came about when I was helping Sanya come up with potential products to sell at Tazi's Cafe. This is a compilation of my favorite parts of several different recipes I considered. It's easy to customize this recipe (see variations below for some ideas). I've tried it with almonds & cranberries, hazelnuts & chocolate chips, and pecans (the last one being my least favorite). I've tried melting chocolate into the dough to make chocolate and almond biscotti. That turned out well, but I prefer using chocolate chips instead of melting the chocolate and ending up with a dark brown biscotti. I've also tried making this recipe with whole wheat flour, which I liked less than using all-purpose flour -- the taste/texture of the flour didn't seem to fit with the cookie. Point being, there are plenty of ways you can customize this recipe. Try playing around with the ingredients, and let us know if you come up with anything delicious!

[Makes about 18 biscotti.]
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. vanilla
2 1/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. cardamom
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup almonds
2/3 cup cranberries

Directions
Preheat oven to 350F.

Melt the butter so that it is soft but not too warm. Using an electric mixer, beat together butter, sugar, and eggs. Beat in flour. If using a hand mixer, the mixture may get too dry for the mixer to handle, in which case mix the rest with a fork. Add in spices, baking powder, salt and mix in.
Fold in nuts and cranberries. The dough should be pretty firm at this point, and should not stick to your hands.

Dump out dough onto a silicone- or parchment-lined baking sheet. Shape dough into a long log, flattening out the top so that the log is about 2" wide and 1/2" thick, and even throughout.

Bake for 30 minutes at 350F. Turn down oven to 325F. Remove from oven and slice into individual biscotti and turn cut-side up on the baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 325F. Then flip biscotti so that the other cut-side faces up and bake for another 10 minutes.

Remove from oven, allow to cool, and enjoy.

Variations:

1. Hazelnut & Chocolate Chips
   Don't add any vanilla, and substitute 1 cup roasted hazelnuts for the almonds and 1/2 cup of chocolate chips for the cranberries.
2. Almond extract
   If making the almond variety, try using 1-2 teaspoons of almond extract in addition to, or perhaps instead of the vanilla for a stronger almond taste.
3. Chocolate biscotti
   Melt a few semisweet chocolate squares with the butter.
4. Chocolate-dipped biscotti
   Melt together 1/2 cup dark chocolate, 1/2 tsp. instant coffee, 2 Tbsp. butter, and a pinch of salt in a double boiler. Dip bottoms of baked biscotti directly into chocolate. Place chocolate side down on parchment paper and let the chocolate harden to room temperature (or chill in fridge).